“Passion partakes resilience, even when draconian regulations have been imposed.” The saying has been rightfully justified in Abkhazia, a small sandwiched landmass between Russia and Georgia defying the odds to lift the ban on Bitcoin mining this month. The mining on Bitcoin was under strict scrutiny due to an unprecedented increase in electricity consumption. US $6,00,000 of mining gigs have been imported even during the ban period, compelling the authorities to question how it was possible to import mining gigs even after stricter banning protocols followed.
But a sign of relief prevails with the ban-lift among the community; however, it has come with regulations to flush out malicious miners. The authorities have recently imposed a moratorium for 2.5 months in the fresh acquisition of mining assets. With that said, the Ministry of Economy has taken the onus to draft a plan of action that will come into force in the next 60 days to regulate all mining activities in the disputed territory of just 2,45,000 individuals. In this first phase of operations, the state electricity board will prepare a swift data mining plan to extract the information of those mining in the area and electricity consumption done by every household.
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The authorities have complained that under the pretext of tourism, there are many foreign tourists who are visiting the country and performing ill-legal mining putting a tremendous amount of pressure on the power grid. To prevent any future black-out situation, the authorities will closely monitor households and figure out the high consuming electricity areas for streamlining their next action move. In the process, they will be analyzing the miners and their activities, like whether they are the residents of Abkhazia or the tourists who have landed at Abkhazia on the pretext of tourism and putting enormous pressure on the power-grid crippling all productive operations in the territory.
There are general concerns haunting the authorities that due to the CoronaVirus pandemic and loss of jobs and means to earn, there are probabilities that Bitcoin mining could well emerge as a shadow economy which will be very hard to track. At present, there has been a significant jump in the mining activities with over US$300 billion in liquidity to the mining pool as we write this piece. Bitcoin has fallen to US$817; whereas, Ethereum continues to ride the bullish sentiments at US$245.
